The gripping story of 1 American lawyer’s obsessive crusade-waged at any cost-against Big Oil on behalf of the indegent farmers and indigenous tribes from the Amazon rainforest.

Steven Donziger, a self-styled social activist and Harvard educated lawyer, signed on to a budding course action lawsuit against multinational Texaco (which later on merged with Chevron to be the third-largest corporation in the us). The suit wanted reparations for the Ecuadorian peasants and tribes people whose lives about Laws of the Jungle: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest as well as the Lawyer Who’d Visit Nothing to Gain were suffering from decades of oil production near their villages and fields. During twenty years of legal hostilities in federal government courts in Manhattan and remote control provincial tribunals in the Ecuadorian jungle, Donziger and Chevron’s lawyers followed fierce no-holds-barred rules. Donziger, a larger-than-life, loud-mouthed showman, proved himself a master orchestrator of the press, Hollywood, and open public opinion. He cajoled and coerced Ecuadorian judges on the idea that his commendable ends justified any means of persuasion. And in the end, he gained an unlikely success, a $19 billion judgment against Chevon–the biggest environmental problems award in history. But the organization refused to surrender or compromise. Rather, Chevron targeted Donziger personally, and its counter-attack uncovered damning evidence of his politicking and manipulation of evidence. All of a sudden the verdict, and years of Donziger’s single-minded quest for the case, started to unravel.

Written with the texture and flair of the best narrative nonfiction, Regulation of the Jungle can be an unputdownable story in which you can find countless victims, a vast area of ruined rivers and polluted rainforest, but hardly any heroes.